Myette.org

Friends-

Greetings from our new home in Honduras! We have lots of new stories to share with you and the last few weeks have been full of excitement but, as always, first the highlights:

• We?re safe and sound and fully moved into our new home. 
• I became the first person from our group to get malaria and had malaria the first week we got here. 
• This is both the most beautiful place I’ve ever lived and one of the most challenging. 
• The people and the kids are wonderful and we’re excited for our next two years. 
• As always the pictures are up at http://www.myette.org/gallery

On to the details:

We had a great trip down from Guatemala to Honduras. We took 6 days to get down here with stops in Antigua, Guatemala and Copan, Honduras. One of the best parts of our trip was meeting Zulena Pescatore and her five children in Antigua. Zulena founded the Finca with her late husband Vincent and it was really wonderful to spend time with her and hear her amazing story. It was especially cool because she kept talking about how Michael was so much like her kids who grew up on the Finca too.

Back to our trip. We met up with Kevin, one of the current volunteers, in Ceiba which is about 3 hours from Trujillo. He rode back with us and answered all our millions of questions as we drove into Trujillo and on down the dirt road to the Finca. It’s definitely an adjustment living in literally the jungle on the coast. It’s very very remote. We live about 5 miles outside of town and it takes us 20 minutes to get in crossing 7 rivers that range from a few inches to over the hood of the car at the worst times in rainy season. There are lots of things to keep us safe including having one car on the Finca at all times in case of an emergency. We also have marine radios that keep us in constant contact with the two houses that we have in town, any cars that are on the road and we’re on the same channel that all the gringos in the area monitor so we can call our friends and neighbors in an emergency (it’s unfortunately a reality of life that we get cars stuck in the river once or twice a year and need to tow them out). We also have the biggest strongest cars in the area, two Toyota land cruisers that have these cool snorkels to pull air from up high in case water washes up over the hood. No flooding our engine for us.

The property itself is beautiful. I put lots of pictures up on our web site so I’ll let you see for yourself, but it’s about 25 acres right on the Caribbean and is situated around a big futbol (soccer) field in the middle. The buildings of the Finca surround the field so imagine standing in the middle of the field and take a little tour in your mind. Going counterclockwise and starting behind the western goal is the chapel, then our library and the 6 open air classrooms of our school. Next is our front gate and then our house. Then you have the carpentry shop, which occupies the other half of the building where our house is, and the medical clinic. Behind the east goal begins the houses where the children live with their houseparents. The 6 houses line the futbol field on the north side and are set among citrus orchards, banana and palm trees. Behind those houses is the beach and tucked back in a corner of the finca, not directly on the field, is the volunteer house, convent, car workshop and storage sheds.

Our house is really great. It’s very simple and perfect for us with a bedroom living room and kitchen. They put a new roof on just before we arrived so it was a bit of an adventure because the roof hadn’t been completely bolted down yet when we started moving in. We still have a few leaks but fortunately cement floor make for really easy cleanup and we think we’ve figured out the problem and are on track to get it taken care of this week before the rainy season starts full force. We still have some minor things that need done like putting a water filter in, getting curtains up and they’re still building us some furniture, but little by little we’re making it our own. One of the best parts of our house is our front porch which looks out on the field and the whole farm so we have a great view of everything that’s going on and can sit on the porch while Michael runs to his hearts content and can pretty much go anywhere and we can still see him. He spends most of his days playing in the dirt, running around, looking at bugs and playing with anyone and everyone he sees. Just like little boys should.

It also doesn’t hurt our quality of life that from our front porch we can see the ocean. I love being near the ocean again. It reminds me so much of Florida with the sea grapes and fish. We’re in a bay so the water is crystal clear and at times it’s so calm it’s almost glass like. I also got stung by jellyfish (it didn’t really hurt), found lots of sand dollars and Becky saw a sting ray. I’ve been swimming four or five times a week since we’ve been here and hope I can keep it up when work starts being crazy. Becky has taught swimming so we’ve recruited her to teach Michael some time in the next two years.

One of the great things for us about being here is the volunteer community. The volunteer house is a big 7 room house with a huge kitchen table that comfortable sits 18 people for meals. Right now there are 19 at meals on a regular basis of us because of the overlap as the oldest group trains us to take over their jobs before they leave December 3rd. At the moment we have 17 people living in the volunteer house, 2 of us in our house and 4 vols in our teen houses in Trujillo. We all take turns cooking and meals can be quite an adventure (tonight was Andrea’s birthday so we had 32 people for dinner!).

We get roughly the same food rations that all the houses get (we get more pasta, they get more rice) and have to be pretty inventive with basic ingredients. On the finca we only have one refrigerator and one big freezer (for storing meat) that all the houses share and each week we get huge bags of beans, rice, flour, and sugar, plus some meat (usually enough meat for three meals a week), fresh veggies and assorted other rations. The people who cook toward the end of the week always get stuck trying to come up with a meal composed solely of flour, onions and carrots or some other strange combination. As a community we’ve decided to eat beans and rice three times a week for lunch out of a desire to live simply and in an effort to cut down on preparation time to free us up for the other work we have to do. All of our meals are simple but a lot of work goes into them and although I’ve lost some weight from the change in diet (i.e. eating much less crap) I’ve never been hungry.

Although we have our own kitchen Erika, Michael and I mostly eat with the volunteer community at the vol house. Meals are such a great time and only having to cook 4 times a weeks instead of 3 meals a day is a great plus.

After the first two weeks of orientation we picked our jobs and have started training to replace those who will be leaving in December. I will be a teacher in our K-6 school and Erika will be a part time social worker, working with one of the chiquito houses (the 3-8 year olds). We]ve started training for our jobs and will take over little by little over the next few weeks. Things start gradually for me because the school year is opposite down here from the states and instead of a summer vacation their three month break comes in the winter. We’re just about to start the rainy season and travel becomes much more dangerous and difficult so they are off of school during the rainy season (our school serves the surrounding villages in addition to the kids who live on the finca). Next week is actually the last week of school. But just like we have summer camp in the states they have winter camp down here so we can keep the finca kids occupied during break. So we’re working hard planning for that and then looking ahead to the next school year which starts in February. We also have side jobs so I’ll be working on the newsletter, vocational programs and tutoring and Erika will be doing story hour and organizing one of our storage bodegas.

After looking at our schedule and what we hoped to accomplish we made the decision to hire someone to take care of Michael for a few hours in the mornings to give Erika and I a chunk of time to both work and then we can switch on and off during the afternoons. After lots of discussion with the community we talked with a woman named Delia who is a friend of the finca and lives near by and she is going to help us with Michael in the mornings. She’s someone who all of the volunteers know and thought would be perfect and we are really excited particularly because Michael will have great one on one time with her to really develop his Spanish which is improving every day.

I know you’ve all read this far just to hear about my malaria. Yes, within a week of getting here I got malaria. I know it sounds scary but it’s totally not a big deal and I’m 100% recovered from it and there is no chance of it recurring unless I get bitten by another mosquito and it manages to get past my anti-malarial pills again (I was taking anti-malarial medication to prevent malaria, it just isn’t 100% effective). It was just a cyclical fever (meaning it spikes every 8-16 hours) and didn’t feel much worse than a really bad flu, but I had a pretty light case. Erika and I seem to be having our share of strange illnesses. We actually had to wake one of the nurses up in the middle of the night the first week because Erika was having kidney pain so bad she had never felt anything like it in her life (including childbirth). Monica’s best guess was that she might have kidney stones so we almost got in the land cruiser at 2am to drive 3 hours to the hospital in Ceiba. But we decided to wait it out and it soon passed never to be heard from again. We also each did a round of antibiotics for our all too frequent trips to the bathroom that come with adjusting to the water, food etc. The common wisdom is that it takes a few months for your body to get adjusted and for some it takes longer than others. Guess that’s us. It’s just so awesome that we have a clinic here and great nurses to take care of all of our mysterious illnesses.

The good news is that so far Michael’s avoided the strange illnesses altogether. Just some common household heat rash and I’ll take that any day over kidney stones. We’ll keep you updated as new and strange illnesses arise.

Ok, now on to more fun stuff. First the one about the nun who plays guitar. The nuns here are called hermanas (”sisters”) but their title, when you speak to them is Sor (pronounced “sore”). So the first time I heard someone talk about Sor Lucy I thought maybe it was a nickname, like she had really bad arthritis or something. Anyhow, there are three sors here and they’re Franciscans so they do the whole big brown habit thing. It’s pretty sweet. Our second day here we had a mass to welcome the new vols and celebrate the birthday of Vincent Pescatore our late founder. The first time I met Sor Estella, our director, was with guitar in hand leading the kids in song. I love a nun who plays guitar. The other highlight of that night was the bats that circled overhead in the chapel during the entire mass, not a common occurrence but definitely one that cracked me up. We also had a Jesuit priest saying the mass who didn’t so much say mass as skip the whole eucharistic prayer and not actually consecrate anything. He’s not a finca regular and likely won’t be back much.

We’ve also arrived during tarantula and scorpion season and have already had a few tarantulas and one scorpion. I was so proud of Erika because she saw her first tarantula and didn’t freak and is doing really really well with all the bugs. It helps that neither the tarantulas nor the scorpions are poisonous enough to really do any permanent damage just give you a sore arm or whatever. We’re also here at the beginning of mosquito season and it hasn?t been so bad. I rarely wear bug spray and don’t get bitten very often so I’ll count that one as a win.

It’s a really strange dichotomy because it’s so simple and beautiful here and at times can be so challenging. It’s such a production to go into town to buy something as simple as peanut butter and usually takes most of a day. Even though we send at least 3 or 4 trips to town each week we’re lucky if we each get in once a week to get anything we need at the grocery store or email or whatever. If we forget something, that’s it for the next week. Email and phone are so remote and a simple cold (or malaria) is taken to another level when you live in the middle of nowhere. Our maintenance man is taking advantage of a trip to San Pedro Sula (6 hours away) to pick up hardware he just can’t get anywhere near us. It’ll definitely take some time to get used to.

I’m typing this up on a computer at the finca so I can save time on email tomorrow. It’s 10pm and about an hour past my bed time. Our new schedule is up at 5:30am for community prayer at 6am and to bed by 9pm. Tomorrow is Saturday and is a late day because I’m not going to leave for town until 6:30am so I get to sleep in until 6am, woohoo!

I want to make sure I leave you knowing that we love it here and are so comfortable being in the right place with the right people doing the right thing as a family. We do miss you all dearly and feel very far from you. We love reading your emails and hope that you understand that with the limited (and slow!) email we have it may take us a while to respond. Keep sending us news from home, we love to read it. We miss being a phone call away but know that we think of you often and pray for you even more so.

Remember there are pictures of our new home and other updates on our website http://www.myette.org. I hope you enjoy the pictures because it took a long time to upload them on our slow connection! We love you all and will write more soon.

Michael-John, Erika and Michael